


Candy Striper Strange (Meta Series)

by Candy Striper Strange (peppersasen)



Series: Candy Striper Strange! [1]
Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Original Work
Genre: Astral Projection, Astro-Shifting, AstroCompass, Astrology, Cosmic Mixology, Dreams, Gen, Lucid Dreaming, Near Death Experiences, Out of Body Experiences, Traditional Astrology
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-16
Updated: 2018-02-16
Packaged: 2019-03-19 11:38:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13703700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peppersasen/pseuds/Candy%20Striper%20Strange





	Candy Striper Strange (Meta Series)

# February 15:

It is Chinese New Year’s Eve, I’m minding my own business, and the recluse in me is trying to make a difficult life decision: Should I spend the rest of the evening up until bedtime watching murder documentaries on YouTube, or read tentacle smut on AO3? I was conflicted. It was a more difficult choice to make compared to the obvious choice when choosing between staying home and socialising with people you don’t even like.

As I try and decide which one of those pursuits would be more worthy of my time, Daft Punk’s “Digital Love” is playing on my mobile phone, when the earphones all of the sudden stop working… So, I pull the plugs off my earlobes to check what’s wrong with them, and this sparkly circle thingy that looks like a giant sparkler appears in the middle of my room, right at the spot in my room where I like to dance when nobody’s looking.

The sparkler opens, widens, and this tall, lanky hottie in a bulky outfit and a red cape walks out of it… And I’m thinking, “wow. You’re hot. I like you!” He looks real angry, though.

I sit up and mumble, “this must be a wet dream!”

Yes! [Mentally fist pumps.] Finally! I’m going to get laid!

“No,” he says, as if he’d read my mind. “This is the part where you say, ‘am I in trouble’?”

Hm. Okay, that didn’t sound like a porno dialogue… Or did it? Perhaps this _isn’t_ a dream. Arguably that could’ve been a porno line, on paper. Theoretically. But that would depend on how the line was delivered—and that didn’t sound like a porno delivery, but then why is he wearing that weird red velvet cape? The circumstances were far too strange for this occurrence to not lead into a porno scenario, but I couldn’t be sure. I study him. Hottie with the goatee is looking at me accusingly. Serious as fuck. Totally lacking in any porno-like mannerisms. Suddenly I don’t feel so porno anymore, do I? What a turn off! Instead, I get defensive and I don’t know why. What the fuck could he possibly so mad about?

“I haven’t done anything wrong?!” I defend myself against a who-knows-what accusation.

“You think?” Hottie retorts.

“Well, you’re sassy!”

The rest is history.

And will sound like semi-autobiographical lazy-writing narrated in the first person.

The hottie with goatee’s name is Doctor Strange, but I like to call him Stephen. Or Duncebag™ as an endearment (only I’m allowed to call him that, by the way—special privilege).

But first, before we get into the parts that will become “the rest is history” in the near future, let’s peer into the actual past.

* * *

 

# Three years earlier…

Okay, actually? Before we look into what happened three years earlier, let’s talk about something that happened even before than that. Like, before-I-was born earlier.

Remember the Reagan assassination attempt? March 30, 1981. Technically I didn’t “remember” remember it because I wasn’t born then, but history said it happened and there’s footage, so like the rest of the world, I took the event as fact and followed suit and believed it happened because that’s just how history works, doesn’t it? History says so, and so the sheeple just believe it. (It’s not like most of us can verify most of these things unless they know how to time-travel.)

So, here’s the version of history currently accepted by the masses:

A John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan to impress the actress Jodie Foster, after seeing her in the 1976 film “Taxi Driver” which he became obsessed in, watching the film at least 15 times, because he felt he could identify with the protagonist. He also became so obsessed in Jodie, that after reading in People magazine how she was attending a writing course at Yale, enrolled himself into the same class to stalk her. Dude.

Creepy guy. How do these psychos even get their hands on firearms, anyway? Are they selling them like candy? Never mind.

Like, I get being obsessed in a fictional character, but why can’t you just write fanfiction online like the rest of us? No need to murder a head-of-state. FFS. I just can’t with fanboys like that…

Anyway! My point is, after the assassination attempt, Ronnie’s wife, Nancy becomes obsessed in astrology. She asked Joan Quigley, an astrologer friend, whether the assassination attempt could have been predicted and, possibly, prevented. Joan said in fact there were signs. And then Nancy developed what I would describe as an astrology addiction, or at least an over-reliance on it. I don’t know to what extent she believes in fate or where she stood on the fatalist scale, but she’d schedule everything based on astrology. Even Air Force One flights.

Now, in an ideal world which consisted of humanist human beings, this story should have made a person-with-compassion’s heart bleed. Yes, she’s privileged, but it’s lonely at the top and how many people can relate to the struggles of a First Lady? Not that many. And not all that do are able to handle the pressure.

Except later the world proved that it wasn’t so compassionate after all. They could barely sympathise, let alone empathise. Then came the villainising magazine covers, and the headlines. Homo sapiens were assholes in the ‘80s (and last time I checked, they still very much are).

The media so caught up in shaming a woman’s beliefs, they couldn’t see that they were ridiculing a woman’s coping mechanism in dealing with a traumatic event. But as long as the bullying and persecution was done “in the name of science”, it was all perfectly acceptable. I guess they were bullying for research purposes to get more funding.

Such is the world we live in now...

* * *

  **Now back to three years earlier:**

So, why I am reminding you of what happened to Nancy Reagan?

Well, because what happened to me three years ago is what I like to call my “Nancy Reagan moment”.

That humbling rug-pulled-from-under-my-feet moment that turns your world upside-down where people discover astrology. In my case it was the what-I-thought-was-my-first-proper-adult-relationship was taken away from me.

It was slowly, cruelly robbed from me. I couldn’t even pinpoint when the relationship “ended”, if it ever did. The first two years that followed felt like a beginning of an end that never really begun… As far as I was concerned, for the first two years of it, he was still my boyfriend. I was so confused. And then I made myself believe that he was just as confused and frustrated as I was. I hoped it would get better and the situation would improve, but nothing ever changed. I was all alone and nobody helped.

I still didn’t know what was going on. I felt like much of it was kept hidden away from me, almost as if to protect me. But it was still so painful that my mind began gas-lighting itself, and I could no longer tell what was real anymore or if I was actually mentally ill and it was just my imagination. It was like being in a nightmare of a limbo which consisted of depression and anxiety—anxiety so severe that I would wake up in the morning with my heart pounding hard into my eardrums even before my half-asleep mind could register what was wrong with my life at the time.

Sometimes my heart would physically pound for the rest of the day without me acknowledging what I was so sad about, just walking around with a heavy burdening sadness.

Then in the third year, I made peace with myself and let go of attachment.

During that difficult time, I discovered astrology.

People rarely discover astrology when they’re happy.

Astrology isn’t a pursuit of the happy, even though it can be fun if you make it.

I didn’t purposefully set out to study to become a “cosmic mixologist”—I wasn’t even aware that that was a thing—even Stephen wasn’t sure what to make of what I was doing. At the time, I didn’t even think my ability to move the positions of planets and asteroids, or the planetary energy-harvesting were real. I thought they were just strange dreams. Strange dreams that “came true” in real life. There wasn’t any special mixologist school you could attend, Stephen and I just tried to figure everything out as we went. There were publicly-available astrology books and there were Stephen’s “magical super powers”, and then there was what I was doing, which was something in between, a combination of both.

He wasn’t aware that this could develop into a superpower, let alone me.

It started as a weird fascination and a coping mechanism to deal with heartbreak. A ‘quirk’ I had keep hidden because astrology was unacceptable and the reason I was bullied by my peers, as celebrity “scientists” made it cool to ridicule people for merely being curious about it, without necessarily believing in it. They claimed they wanted to make science more accessible and mainstream, but they also normalised persecution of beliefs and most people accepted it without question.

Most people discover astrology through the twelve sun signs and wonder whether there’s more to it and learn that there is. Not me.

I accidentally discovered astrology while I sought to find physical answers—not metaphysical answers, or at least a psychological explanation to my mess of a love life. I wanted to know why what I thought I had crumbled before it even took off. Was the man I thought was my boyfriend really who he said he was? Was he even real? An impostor?

I Googled and Googled and read everything I could find online. And one day, I stumbled upon this bizarre blog on Tumblr… It called itself an “astrology” blog, but it wasn’t my idea of what astrology was: You know, those twelve zodiac signs printed on the Sunday paper and fashion magazines, about a generic paragraph each that didn’t really tell you much? Well, this wasn’t a fluff paragraph about nothing. It was… So complex. Which made it all the more compelling for me to decipher.

It was a lot to take in. At first, I just read the bloggers’ interpretations of how these celestial events manifested to life on Earth—without paying much attention to all the overwhelming details and jargon. “Aspects! Orbs? Natal! Transits. Progressions. Eclipses, retrogrades, waxing moon, waning moon…” This is not an episode of “Sailor Moon”, all the numbers and space objects. This wasn’t the woozy crystal ball or clouds-in-my-coffee that I had in envisioned. It was very _technical_. And for all the crazy details and precision, it was bizarrely accurate.

Of course, being the skeptic that I was and always had been, I felt obligated to question what I was reading and learning—after all this is something I originally studied to deal with a traumatic life event, thus naturally I wanted to be sure that I hadn’t gone completely bonkers and shut myself into a self-inflicted confirmation bias bubble?

And so I checked myself: If my birth time and birthplace meant that my moon sign was Cancer, I’d compare real-life traits to the theoretical traits if I had been born when the moon was in Aries, and so on and so forth. I went through all twelve signs for each planetary placement and angle. I found that if I had no major natal placements in a sign, for example: I had zilch in Aries, I wouldn’t have any Aries traits. But if my Rising sign was Taurus, then the traits of someone with a moon in Taurus would fit, but only slightly and mostly in different areas of life, or they would complement each other. And even as every house had one of the twelve signs assigned to it, I still had “blind spots” for certain signs (for instance, an IC in Leo didn’t necessarily mean I carried Leo traits—if anything it meant that I had a Leo-like childhood and I was so fed-up with it that I wanted nothing to do with a Leo-like life under the spotlight as an adult).

I figured there must be something to it. And it was utterly fascinating.

Everything I could find about it online, I read and studied. First, I learned the basic traits of each Sun sign. Then what each planet rules and what the houses represented. A year later, I order my first paper books online. They’re on my shelf.

My formulae developed from: {Planet x House} and {Planet x Sign} separately, to {Planet x Sign + House}.

And eventually evolved to [(Planetary Objects Including Asteroids + Degree) x {Planet + Sign}].

Eventually taking major and minor aspects into consideration, relying on an aspectarian before I began using tools like a 180° round ruler and ephemeris, until I could read aspects with my naked eyes just by lining up my fingers between planets on a wheel chart, much like an artist measuring proportions on their painting.

But it was only after I had studied started reading on the Sabian symbols that I began having dreams where I was able to move planetary objects upon my will.

The Sabian symbols stuck out to me because they were only mystical or “woo-woo” thing I’ve encountered since I began studying astrology. I was getting tired of the angles and degrees and all the maths. I was getting bored and something interesting finally happened. Finally, something whimsical and fun and pretty. The recurring dreams I had since I began studying the Sabian symbols were equally beautiful…

* * *

The dreams were vague and extremely disorienting at first. But they did become more vivid with time.

In the dreams, I would be ‘swimming’ in space. It seemed to come very naturally to me, like a fish swimming in water, skinny-dipping sans space suit—which I thought was odd because I couldn’t swim in my waking life (I have a phobia of dark, deep, and large masses of water from seeing a blue whale as a child).

I was able to function normally in space. I breathed perfectly well, but sometimes after dreams of being in space for longer periods of time, my feet would feel wobbly when I woke up. And I’d stumble out of bed and sometimes I trip over on the floor as if I’d forgotten how to walk. One time, after an especially long and vivid dream, I spent the whole morning crawling in my room before I had my first coffee of the day (keeping an electric kettle in one’s bedroom is always sound decision-making).

I had always been a heavy dreamer. Sometimes I’d see things and story lines in dreams, and they would ‘come true’ in my waking life. I figured perhaps the dream world must be a parallel dimension that we enter at certain stages of sleep. Usually everything would be wonky and a tad loop-sided, but my waking-life experiences would mirror what I saw in those dreams. Sometimes I realise in retrospect that some of the dreams I had were warnings, but I didn’t get the memo when I could’ve prevented what was to happen. I was used to it.

But these space dreams were different: My inability to walk when I woke-up in the morning felt more like a consequence of the space-swimming in my dreams, rather than a parallel waking-life occurrence.

So, I did some research, and never did figure out why these outer space dreams felt different, or what kind of dream these were. I’d ask users on online forums, everyone I could ask from spiritual forums to neurosciences forums to study groups where the med school students shared class notes, but nobody had any idea what I was talking about…

However, I did come upon this thing called “lucid dreaming”, and I tried it and experimented with it because, eh, why not?

* * *

At first when I began lucid dreaming, I thought I was still just dreaming—only with more control to manipulate what was happening in the dream. And then I realised that by aligning my fingers in an aspect position like I’d do when working on a computer-generated chart, the planets and space objects would _move_ following my hand gestures!

You guys: They. Would. Move.

I could move planets. Holy shit.

I’m getting goose bumps just telling you about it.

And even weirder? Then I’d wake up in the morning after moving planetary objects in my dreams, and the world would feel different. I shit you not.

The waking world didn’t look any different physically, but I could just sense that something had changed.

Not only was my body ‘hungover’ from the space-swimming in my dreams, I could sense an energy shift after I had been moving the planets around to different houses or signs.

So, I started messing around with it: If I felt like everybody was being overbearingly thirsty on social media when the moon was in Leo, I’d move it to Aquarius and I’d wake-up the next morning with an Instagram feed that was chill as a cucumber. Even the reality TV famehoes stopped flashing their butts that day (I was _making a difference_ , making the world a better place, finally making my contribution—it was a gloriously wonderful feeling). If the moon was in Cancer and I felt mushy 24/7 and cried like I was living in the Hallmark Channel, I’d move it into Sagittarius (with Jupiter in a trine or sextile) and align the 8th house into that same sign, et voilà: Twitter’s exploding the dirtiest of dirty x-rated jokes. God, I love dark humour… LOL.

Unfortunately, these energetic changes were temporary. So, I started taking notes and recorded how long each astrological energy shift lasted, cross-checked with the natural law’s planetary transits. On average, they would last to about 7–8 hours usually, 12 hours max.

For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why they lasted only a certain number of hours. It wasn’t until Stephen confronted me on Chinese New Year’s Eve that he was the one reversing all my work—or in his words, “cleaning up after the mess you made”—it was the time difference between Jakarta and New York’s timezones.

* * *

 Naturally this led me to move a level up from lucid dreaming to astral projection: I’d had a near-death experience (nearly died on the table during surgery) and ever since, I had several out-of-body experiences in my sleep. I wondered whether you could do that on purpose. Doctor Google says, “Indeed, you can, my dear! It’s called ‘astral projection’. Now follow me to this wonderful YouTube tutorial…”

It took a while to master astral projection because the YouTube tutorials are obviously nothing as good as the books Wong had in the library that Stephen had back in Kamar-Taj (seriously, Wong should have all those books scanned and share them online on the Project Gutenberg or something, but Stephen thinks putting that stuff online is a terrible idea).

After mastering astral projection, I was able to astro-shift on purpose (I no longer had to wait until I was ‘blessed’ with a dream while I was asleep).

Not only did it work, there were extra features too. Like a skill/weaponry upgrade in a video game:

When I used astro-shift in my lucid dreams, there were visible lines that served as borders between the astrological houses and zodiac territories, it was easier because these lines were clear, and it was like working on a giant real-scale astrological chart, all in 4D.

I also had enhanced vision in the dreams—which initially I thought was random dream dimension wonkiness given that I was short-sighted in my waking life… But it proved to be useful because I could see as far as Pluto.

After I graduated into astral projection, the training-wheel lines were gone, but I’d have this compass that only seemed to exist in the astral plane (because I never managed to conjure it this dimension—although I’m thinking Stephen might have a spell for that, I’d really like to play with it for a bit).

But still, the changes I made only lasted about 8 hours—which was a little frustrating. But it was useful nonetheless. If I needed a little burst of change/window of opportunity for something, I’d do it and enjoy the effects while it lasted. But the changes were never permanent.

For some reason I just assumed that my increased control over the actual moving of space objects during astro-shifting automatically meant better quality shifts. Mais non. It didn’t. The shifts were temporary still.

The first two weeks of my astro-shifting using astral projection, I shrug it off because I think this ‘thing’, whatever it was—a power? Had an expiry date, like the ‘magic’ was only meant to last a few hours by nature. But then the shifts began to feel increasingly short-lived and ended in more abrupt fashion…

And I intuitively, almost dare I say “psychically”, sensed someone else (or some unseen ‘force’—shudders) was behind it _and_ I could sense the other end’s annoyance. If it didn’t hurt me, I wasn’t scared or concerned. Just maybe a little curious as to what was going on…

Two months in, it starts feeling like a tug of war—with an invisible entity. Every time I performed an astro-shift, someone immediately reversed it, and I escalated from annoyed to _livid_ that whoever or whatever this was kept party-pooping on my astro-shifts. Someone or something kept cancelling out all my hard work! What the actual _fuck_! And I lose sleep doing this work!

And then I began to wonder… After the second time I did it by way of lucid dreaming, I started seeing this dude in my dreams. He’d be watching me from afar. He gradually came closer, and closer in my recurring dreams.

Then after I began astral-projecting in space, I’d see him in the corner of my eye, and then I’d turn around to try catch him in the act, but I couldn’t spot him, and nobody would be there.

I never got to see his face until Chinese New Year’s Eve (I later learned it was Stephen Strange, except in the dreams he was dressed in a mustard yellow robe like a monk, not the in the outfit he was wearing when he opened that portal in my room that evening).

That night, I did not spend my evening on YouTube or AO3.

I celebrated Chinese New Year at the New York Sanctum.


End file.
